Hi,
I am studying the design of an external courtyard, with green elements and, possibly, water elements.
To evaluate and verify design assumptions I am trying to figure out if and how it is possible to use lady bug tools to simulate outdoor comfort taking into account the effects of:
shading
wind
vegetation, water (possibly taking into account evotranspiration cooling effects)
I surfed on the Internet but I could not find a guide or tutorial or examples adressing those topics.
I would really appreciate if you could provide me any suggstions, even on other software to use (Envimet?)
Thanks in advance for your support.
Outdoor comfort (to soem extend) can be done with honeybee (look at the samples folder which comes with the installation of LBT. However when you want a more integral appraoch you could better use Envimet. look here Dragonfly legacy - Envimet read library not working - #3 by minggangyin
You can try using the UTCImap component for outdoor thermal comfort studies.
MRT input takes care of shading including tree canopy (using Radiance).
For vegetation, including evotranspiration, you can use the ground thermal zones with the greenroof upmost layer.
Water bodies are trickier, but I would look into modifying the air temperature inputs at certain grid points to be closer to wet bulb values.
Wind is a more complicated thing. You can connect annual wind data to the UTCI component. You can get it using Eddy3D, Butterfly or pure OpenFOAM with some additional scripting. This will require some CFD skills as well.
